The US, UN & Iraq II

Guess, who said this:

"If we'd gone to Baghdad and got rid of Saddam Hussein - assuming we could have found him - we'd have had to put a lot of forces in and run him to ground some place. Then, you've got to put a new government in his place and then you're faced with the question of what kind of government are you going to establish in Iraq? Is it going to be a Kurdish government or a Shi'ite government or a Sunni government? How many forces are you going to have to leave there to keep it propped up?"

Right, it was Mr Vice-President Dick Cheney, in 1992, when, as Secretary of Defence, he explained why he didn't go for Baghdad.

The headache's just beginning for America

Thanks for that, Walter.

Walter wrote:

The headache is just starting for America!

That is a remote possibility Walter but Schroeders indigestion now will probably turn into a raging headache when he is forced to stay on the outside looking in.

Criticizing and insulting national leaders can be a double edged sword

Article in today's NYTimes magazine. I've posted the first few paragraphs. It is about revolution and regime change.

The Millimeter Revolution

Agence France-Presse
At a rally in Tehran in late 2000, students displayed portraits of Emadeddin Baghi and other jailed activists and protested the efforts of the government under Supreme Leader Khameni to muzzle the reformist movement with arrests and assassinations.

By ELIZABETH RUBIN

n the winter of 1979, one day after the Iranian revolution extinguished the reign of the shahs, the gates to the notorious Evin prison in northern Tehran were thrown open, and Emadeddin Baghi went in to have a look.

All around him, people in cars, on motorbikes and on bicycles were touring the stone compounds of the hillside prison. They inspected the emptied cellblocks where the tales of cruelty they had grown up on had unfolded. Baghi, who was 17, knew that his religious and political mentor, Ayatollah Hossein Ali Montazeri, had been locked up and tortured at Evin, along with other opponents of the shah.

It was a thrilling moment for Baghi. Just three days earlier, he left his home in southern Tehran with a group of friends to join the army of thousands moving east toward the headquarters of the Iranian Air Force. The shah's guards fired at air force personnel inside their air base for flaunting their loyalty to Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Outside the air force headquarters, people were piling up sandbags and digging trenches. Baghi and his friends made Molotov cocktails. In the afternoon, motorcycles swung by with placards announcing Imam Khomeini's request to the people: stay in the streets and ignore martial law. They stayed all night.

Stocks of weapons and ammunition were looted from the air base. Baghi touched his first gun nervously. It was heavier than he expected. But when his friend test-fired a bullet, Baghi's hesitation vanished. For the next two days, they were armed Islamic revolutionaries, assaulting garrisons and firing upon police stations. ''We imagined ourselves Islamic Che Guevaras,'' one former revolutionary reminisced. The shah's army put up little defense and surrendered after two days. When Baghi finally returned home, his mother, who had thought he was dead, fell to the floor and cried. His father jested: ''You have come back! Why weren't you martyred?''

Wandering through Evin prison was the culmination of those febrile revolutionary days. ''The symbol of the shah's power was under the feet of the people,'' Baghi recalled recently when I met him in Tehran. ''I was wondering, What will they do with the place, turn it into a park?''

Smiling in his earnest, affable way, he went on: ''Of course, I never imagined I'd end up in the same cell where Ayatollah Montazeri and the others were imprisoned under the shah.''

This article is worth finding and reading.

Thanks, Walter for the excellent link. The Internet is wonderful, no? So many articles, so many statements that can't be refuted.

There are two fundamental misconceptions here. One is relatively simple. "The Arab World does not hate the US exclusively; it is the entire Non-Muslim World they rally against."

Now if you replace "the Arab World" in that sentence with "Al-Qaeda" or "the Taliban", it's correct. There most certainly is, by now, a radically anti-Western strand of Islamist zealots. But it doesn't say "Al-Qaeda", it says "the Arab world", and this world most definitely does not collectively "rally against", let alone "hate" all the non-Muslim world. No street demonstration involves the hurling of insults to the Brazilians or Indonesians. No fatwa has been issued against the Russians or French. It is very much American, and Israeli, flags that are being burnt on the streets of Amman and Aden.

The anger of "the Arab street" is directed quite specifically at "the West", and America in particular - and to a large extent refers to very specific issues. Israel. The fate of the Palestinians - remember they have been infused with the images of dead Palestinian kids on TV and elsewhere to the same extent Americans have the burning Twin Towers etched into their subconscious. The presence of US troops in their holy land, near Mecca and Medina, troops they didnt vote in and cant vote out - and the US wanting to use them against what many see as a fellow Arab country being invaded because it wouldnt yield to US control. "The Arab street" is at the same time upset at America for propping up its own absolutist regimes. As one reporter explained: in the Arab world, regimes are too harsh for open street protest against them to be an option. Protesting for a neighbouring country (Iraq) and against the US, when the own regime is seen as complicit in or passive at the US attack, is a way of protesting one's own rulers too.

Americans prefer not to see these concrete issues. Israel is an 'untouchable' topic. The US is in denial about its own responsibility for the emergence of an Arab world dominated by oligarchy and dictatorship, for propping up absolutist regimes that have fostered extremist oppositions. From such explanations for Middle-East anti-Americanism they understandably shirk back. No - if those Arabs are mad at the US, it's not about anything we did or do - it must be our values they oppose - they must not like our [fill in your choice of the loftiest concepts of American culture]. It's about "how they are". Just like the French didn't oppose our war effort because they disagreed or were angered by any of our strategies - it can't be anything we did wrong, it must be something wrong with them, it must be their history, their national character, their jealousy - it's just because of the way they are - you know the French. The Germans. The Russians. And it'c clear there's something wrong with the Arabs, if they hate us. It is in many ways safer for Americans to abstractify the Arab anger into some kind of culturally determined fury, some kind of supposed innate Arab aversion to Western values or rather - because even that would be too close to home - "civilisation" overall ...

The suggested "Clash of Civilisations" is a mere, blanket fall-back argument to disarm painfully concrete questions with.

I gotta admit my phraseology "Arab World" was a swipe with an overly broad brush. However, Radical Islamic Fundamentalism, and paricularly its Armed Militant component, has tremendous influence on The Arab Street. And, I gotta admit that has its roots in the inequities perpetrated on The Arabs by The West. But I submit that justifies neither the inequities nor the response, it merely acknowledges two outrageous conditions. And I submit The Arab World poorly serves itself in the cause of bettering the lives of its people. No one has oppressed and killed more Arabs than have The Arabs themselves. I submit that is not particularly civilized.

I have Arab friends in Egypt, Tanzania, and Iran. I'm sure this is not an exception to the general misconception that Arabs hate Americans. c.i.

I don't believe that war is civilized under any circumstances, and much much less so under the current!

I doubt most Arabs hate Americans. Some hate America's policies. Most are probably somewhere between ambivalent and dismayed.

I listened on C-Span this morning to Mamoun Fandy who teaches at Georgetown and who writes for Asharq al-Awsat in London and also for Al-Ahram in Cairo. He said that Al-Jazeera has an ideological viewpoint, that it is news-receiving as opposed to news-gathering, so far at least. He sees no even-handed Middle-East news source at this time and would listen to CNN before he would rely on Al-Jazeera. He commented on the fact that the US Coalition News source is across the street from the Al-Jazeera broadcasting office, each one putting out an opposing view of the war. Pretty funny, he thought.

In reply to caller's questions and comments, he said that it is indeed obvious that Fox has a nationalistic and pro-war bent, but he can switch around to other US TV channels and get a somewhat different view, although it is clear that they are all unwilling to post much criticism of the current administration.

In commenting on the Arab press, he reminisced about the coverage of the six-day war, when the Arab news media spoke glowingly of the massive shoot-downs of Israeli planes and the war-successes for the Arab world. Euphoria ensued -- shouting and parties in the streets -- until the Arab street learned the truth, and they realized finally that they had been duped. They have never believed their media since, according to Fandy. They knew they had been lied to and are totally cynical about what they are fed, ever since that time. They now listen to the BBC, the Voice of America, and they tune in and out of the Arab news they are offered.

The second misconception in Timber's post, the one about "the failure of Arab Culture to integrate with The Developed World", is more complicated. It's a more mixed scorecard. Because Arabic culture has stagnated, for sure; in comparison with heydays past it seems to be currently lacking some of the vital dynamism and openness that characterised it earlier. In politics, especially, the panorama of ruling regimes does not offer a particularly pretty picture. But Timber doesn't distinguish between regimes and populations, again deflecting political problems into some kind of cultural character. Which does overlook a significant difference. He writes:



What you advocate is exactly what "the Arab street" (the term is not mine) demands.

They want self-determination. And seeing their own self-determination denied by their occupyers (in the case of the Palestinians) or their own rulers - whom they, rightly or wrongly, perceive to be, in their turn, denied much of their self-determination by their American sponsors - they are all the more livid when projecting their own frustration onto the Iraq situation. Hence the fierce protesting at what they see as an arbitrary violation of that country's self-determination.

They want prosperity, of course. One of the reasons some may have put up longer with the rule of the various sheikhs on the peninsula than they would have otherwise is that they guaranteed at least some stability in prosperity. Others are yearning for a chance at something better.

So many young Arabs want the learning, too - want to learn, get ahead, make it, achieve prosperity for themselves and perhaps their country, too. They find themselves frustrated in these ambitions. Frustrated by their own governments, but also by the outside powers that seem to have such a stranglehold on the region, elevating totalitarian regimes into power one decade only to attack them the next. There has been little of that first condition for building on your ambitions: the predictability of your country's fate.

Friend of mine worked in Bethlehem for a year. The young Palestinians wanted nothing more then exactly that freedom and democracy you propagate. Nothing in "the Arab mind" that rejects that for what it is. These Palestinians grumbled about Arafat - his corrupt cronies, his feared police - and hated Netanyahu - the daily humiliations they were exposed to, the hurdles and fences that were sometimes most literally laid around them, keeping them locked into a hopeless situation.

You see the same frustrations elsewhere. Very 'Western' frustrations, when you think about it. Take Al-Jazeera's huge success. How did it become so popular? Such a TV station had never existed before. State TV was submissive, toed the line. Al-Jazeera dared everything. It exposed scandals, without regard for office, rank or country. It didnt conform to the usual censorship, didnt shy away from controversial topics. And the Arabs lapped it up, loved it. Their own, fearless, critical CNN. Both the station's emergence and its popularity signify that far from being anti-modern, overall Arab society yearns for modernity, and applauds those who rattle the bars of their cages. There's a reason why the Al-Jazeera journalists don't back down when the US government expresses taking offence at their insolence, when they refuses to adhere to the administrations guidelines on what not to broadcast, when they ask questions more critical than CNN or Fox do - it made them big. And isnt this a sign - indicating an increasingly emancipated citizenry?

What the problem is the US now faces is not so much that the Arab citizenries don't want "rule-of-law and representative government" - they yearn for it. The problem for the US is that these citizenries are angry - angry at America, at Israel, and at the regimes that denied them that rule-of-law and representative government, and were great buddies with America. Should there really be representative democracy, much of these citizenries would vote for the only credible opposition available. Remember, there used to be highly secular, socialist oppositions. They were clamped down on, with thanks to American diplomatic backup. Now the only opposition left is on the other side. Islamists. The problem for the US is, that true democracy would most probably bring anything but friendly governments in power. See Turkey. Hence the suspicions about how much "freedom and democracy" the Americans really intend to bring to countries like Iraq, if their primary goal was to get rid of one particularly bothersome motherf---er.

The Islamists are a problem in their own right, sure enough - a danger. I don't think the populations at large want fundamentalist rule. But for now they will surely be sympathetic to that one political force trying to break that stagnant, corrupt and dictatorial system. They rallied to the FIS in Algeria to finally get the FLN dictators out - but have been as sickened by the Islamist terror of the GIA as by the state terror opposing it since. Elsewhere, the cycle is still to come; for now, the Islamists will score as the only remaining opposition, especially on the crests of pro-Palestinian rhetorics and resentment at the visible US presence.

For there is a difference between those "universal" values you propagate and the visibility of American popular culture. Only in the US itself are "freedom and democracy" and "Coca-Cola, McDonalds and Madonna" perceived as belonging to the same integral package. If Arabs express resentment at Coca-Cola taking over on Medina's billboards (to make up an example), it is not because they espouse a cultural worldview opposite to ours that by definition implies a "hatred of all the non-Muslim world". It means simply that they'd like the universal values, please, the right to vote in freedom, for example - and would use that right to, first of all, limit the impact of the Coca-Cola/McDonals part of the package thrust on them. I think that's exactly the contradiction we'll see in Iraq, and I wonder whether the Americans will get it, or simply react in repressive knee-jerk fashion.



You blame all this on autonomous developments in the region - no, to some autonomous development of "the Arab culture", which apparently led itself down the drain. Now I'm not going to say there is no problem. Many of the brightest minds have emigrated to the West, fleeing repressive regimes and scarce opportunities. They left behind an increasingly arid intellectual landscape, I understand. But how did this happen again? Did it really happen in some vacuum? Who sought out those minority elites, fattening them to assure a continuous oil flow to the First World? Who bolstered Kings, dictators and presidents who through their totalitarian rule seemed to guarantee US interests or provide counterweights against Iran, the communists, et cetera?

Somebody here ridiculed a peacenik's suggestion that the Iraqis should liberate themselves, saying that that was a cruelly unrealistic expectation to have. The same will go for those in Syria, or even Saudi-Arabia. Breaking free from the constraints of the present political orders is going to be hard. Now ask two questions: how did those systems get and stay into place, and what is done to encourage emancipation? Those regimes, from Saddam's to the Saudi kings', were funded, backed and armed by the West - by France, Britain, and not least the US, too. Alternatives are still not encouraged, out of fear for too much 'critical politics'. Hell, even in Kuwait promises of democracy have evaporated after 1991, with not a word of protest from the Americans.

To sum it up: the West has propped up absolutist regimes, arming them to the teeth, so as to have reliable allies - encouraged such regimes to clamp down on such political opposition as there used to be, encouraged an elite of business magnates that would be friendly to the West. But now that the Arab world is indeed stagnant and absolutist, it is the Arabs which are said to be failing - in their commitment to the 'Western value of democracy' no less; and when they do choose to pressure their governments, resorting to the only effective opposition, the Islamists, they are all terrorists. Something is amiss in that logic.

I really don't remember the name William Kistol on any ballot.


By BRUCE MURPHY
[email protected]
Last Updated: April 5, 2003

Question: Why are we in Iraq?

The buzz in Washington and beyond has been that President Bush's attack on Iraq came straight from the playbook of the neoconservatives, a group of mostly Republican strategists, many of whom have gotten funding from Milwaukee's Bradley Foundation. The neoconservatives differ from traditional conservatives in favoring a more activist role for government and a more aggressive foreign policy.

Led by Weekly Standard editor William Kristol, the neoconservatives have offered a sweeping new vision for U.S. foreign policy: to restructure the Middle East and supplant dictators around the world, using pre-emptive attacks when necessary against any countries seen as potential threats. Traditional conservatives, such as Heritage Foundation fellow John C. Hulsman, suggest that this will lead to "endless war," while Jessica Mathews of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace has charged that "announcing a global crusade on behalf of democracy is arrogant."

Whether Bush ends up sticking with the neoconservative playbook remains to be seen, but a wide range of observers suggest it is a key part of his current game plan.

"I think Bush has drawn upon that thinking," said Michael Joyce, who led the Bradley Foundation, a leading funder of neoconservative thinkers, from 1986 to 2001. Joyce added that Bush's "key people," including Vice President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, "were clearly influenced by this thinking."

Under Joyce, the Bradley Foundation made 15 grants totaling nearly $1.9 million to the New Citizenship Project Inc., a group Kristol led and which also created the Project for a New American Century, a key proponent of a more aggressive U.S. foreign policy. The foundation also is a significant funding source for the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington, D.C., think tank with many neoconservative scholars.

Perhaps more important, noted Joyce, the Bradley Foundation was a longtime funder of Harvard University's John M. Olin Center for Strategic Studies, which until 2000 was run by Samuel P. Huntington, who wrote the influential book "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order" about the conflict between the West and the Muslim world. Huntington trained "a large number of scholars" who have helped develop neoconservative theories, Joyce noted.
Read by the right people

But it is Kristol's Weekly Standard, bankrolled by conservative media tycoon Rupert Murdoch, that has popularized these viewpoints. The Standard may have a circulation of just 55,000, but it has aimed successfully at policy-makers rather than average readers, making it "one of the most influential publications in Washington," a story by The New York Times concluded. Hulsman calls the Standard the "house newspaper" of the Bush administration.

Kristol and Gary Schmidt, executive director of the Project for a New American Century, have accused the media of exaggerating their impact.

"I think it's ludicrous to see all these articles, in this country and in Europe, that somehow we are the diabolical cabal behind the war in Iraq. It wasn't the case that Bill (Kristol) was calling people in the White House advocating for things," Schmidt told the Journal Sentinel. Their influence came from "intellectual leverage, not personal leverage," he added.

In 1997, the Standard's cover story announced that "Saddam Must Go." In 1998, the Standard published a letter to then-President Clinton, calling on him to remove Hussein from power. The letter was signed by 18 people, eight of whom would join the Bush administration in senior positions, including Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and Richard Perle, who serves on the influential Defense Policy Board and was until last month its chairman.
Roman Empire of 21st century?

The neoconservatives argue that we no longer live in a bipolar world, as when Russia faced off against the United States. They see a unipolar world, with America as the Rome of the 21st century, a colossus that can dictate its will to the world, noting that America spends as much on defense as the next 15 countries combined and has troops stationed in 75 countries.

"The fact is," writes Charles Krauthammer, a Washington Post columnist who espouses neoconservative views, "no country has been as dominant culturally, economically, technologically and militarily in the history of the world since the late Roman Empire."

Hulsman summarizes the neoconservative view this way: "We should acknowledge we have an empire. We have power and we should do good with it."

In essence, the neoconservatives argue that national sovereignty is an outdated concept, given the overwhelming power of America, and the U.S. should do all it can to impose democracy on countries. Some have called this approach democratic imperialism. It echoes the do-gooder impulses of Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic president who formulated the League of Nations as a solution to war, then paradoxically blends it with American military might. Hulsman dubbed it "Wilsonianism on steroids."

In a world where nuclear weapons are proliferating, the neoconservatives argue, you can no longer put the genie back in the bottle. "The hard truth is that unless you change some of these regimes, you're going to be hard-pressed to get rid of the threat," Schmidt noted. "Liberal democracies don't go to war with each other."

The theory behind this, developed by Michael Doyle, professor of international affairs at Princeton University, is that democratic governments are reluctant to go to war because they must answer to their citizens. And the history of liberal democracies, though comparatively short in the grand scheme of history, tends to buttress his point.

But for critics such as Hulsman, democracy arises from the bottom up and is "intimately connected with local culture and tradition. It can almost never be successfully imposed from the top down," he contends.

Neoconservatives cite Germany and Japan, but Hulsman noted that Japan is "98 percent ethnically homogenous," unlike Iraq, which is split among three major groups. Yet Japan still required five years of American occupation after World War II before it became an independent democracy.

The mission of democratizing the world may have no end, Hulsman says, because "there are always barbarians to convert."

But whatever his disagreement with it, Hulsman called the neoconservatives' approach "the first new thought in foreign policy for some time."

These ideas had little impact on presidential candidate George W. Bush, who espoused a humble foreign policy that emphatically rejected the kind of nation-building he now envisions for Iraq. In the early days of Bush's administration, Secretary of State Colin Powell's less aggressive views on foreign policy prevailed.

But after the attack on the World Trade Center, everything changed. Wolfowitz was soon declaring that America's intention was not just to target terrorists connected to Osama bin Laden, but to fight a "global war" and eliminate any sovereign states "who sponsor terrorism."
'Critical' voice in Pentagon

Wolfowitz had long held similar views. While third in command at the Pentagon (under Cheney) in 1991, Wolfowitz had argued in favor of pre-emptive action against countries such as Iraq and North Korea. "He was criticized as unduly hawkish prior to September 11th, but you don't hear that criticism now," Joyce said.

Wolfowitz was also unique in that he was comfortable in academia and connected to intellectuals.

"Wolfowitz is critical," Hulsman said. "He's the link between intellectual neocons like Kristol and the world of decision-makers."

Wolfowitz hammered away at the need to attack Iraq, backed by the Weekly Standard and the huge American Enterprise Institute. The institute has supplanted the more traditionally conservative Heritage Foundation, which was more influential with the senior George Bush as the key think tank for GOP insiders. Heritage scholars argue in favor of building alliances, as in the first Gulf War, while the American Enterprise Institute scholars say America's leadership can be decisive, with or without allies.
Turning point of Sept. 11

Joyce said it was inevitable that the younger Bush would embrace the neoconservative view. "I'm not sure September 11th did more than push the timetable up," he said. But press accounts suggest that the events of Sept. 11 were crucial for Bush, and even after this his thinking changed gradually in response to several things:

* The anthrax attacks in New York, Washington and Florida in October 2001 raised fears of Saddam Hussein's involvement.
* Evidence found in Afghanistan the next month that showed Osama bin Laden's group had been trying to secure weapons of mass destruction raised the question again of whether Hussein could be a possible supplier.
* And by early 2002, a source told Time magazine, the stories of Hussein's cruelty to his own people had convinced Bush that the dictator was "insane" and therefore capable of giving weapons of mass destruction to al-Qaida terrorists.

By January 2002, Bush signaled his embrace of the neoconservative vision, declaring Iraq, Iran and North Korea were an "axis of evil" that must be resisted. By May, Bush announced that the U.S. would take pre-emptive action against threats from such regimes.

To the neoconservatives, the question of what weapons Hussein might actually possess was less important than his intention to get them. "Once the nuclear materials are there, you're screwed," argued Schmidt of the Project for a New American Century. "When you can really do pre-emption is when it's early."
'Draining the swamp'

Overthrowing Hussein could also accomplish broader goals.

Neoconservatives often talk about "draining the swamp" in the Middle East. Once Hussein is removed, Hudson Institute co-founder Max Singer has predicted, "there will be an earthquake throughout the region" that could topple the leadership of Saudi Arabia.

Even more pressing, says Schmidt, is the need to create a more moderate regime in Iran, which could have a nuclear weapon in 18 to 24 months, he predicted. (By contrast, North Korea, which already has nuclear weapons, would have to be approached very differently.)

If the goal is to transform the Middle East, the obvious place to start is with Iraq, which was already in trouble with the United Nations, had little international standing and was reviled even by some Arab nations.

A recent story in Time suggests that Cheney became convinced by his discussions with Fouad Ajami, professor and director of Middle East studies at Johns Hopkins University, that the people of Iraq would "erupt in joy" at the arrival of the Americans. Others have predicted a victory in Iraq could lead to regime changes in Iran, Syria, the Palestinian Liberation Organization, Yemen and elsewhere.

"To these states," Richard Perle recently suggested, "we could deliver . . . a two-word message: You're next."

Some Middle Eastern leaders have already gotten this message.

"We are all targeted," Syrian President Bashar Assad told an Arab summit meeting on March 1.
Quick action required

If the war in Iraq lasts months rather than weeks, the theory that overwhelming American power can simultaneously pursue objectives in Iraq and beyond will be tested.

"If this is to be done, it has to be done rapidly," Schmidt said of the Iraq war.

Lawrence F. Kaplan, Kristol's co-author of the influential book "The War Over Iraq," has put it this way: "The real question is not whether the American military can topple Hussein's regime, but whether the American public has the stomach for imperial involvement of a kind we have not known since the United States occupied Germany and Japan."

The public's stomach could be affected not just by the war's cost in lives, but also by its costs in dollars. Beyond the $380 billion defense budget, the war already is expected to cost an additional $80 billion, with some administration officials estimating it could go as high as $200 billion.
War's naysayers

Michael O'Hanlon, a defense policy expert at the Brookings Institution, a liberal Washington, D.C., think tank, has argued that most university experts oppose U.S. policy in Iraq.

There are even naysayers within the Bush administration and among retired military officials.

Hulsman described the neoconservatives as "a very incestuous, self-referential group of people."

"It's like what we saw with Vietnam. If you surround yourself with people who agree, you get in trouble."

But Hulsman noted that the secretary of state and his staff have been less enthusiastic about the neoconservative vision and are probably more comfortable with the international "realists" at the Heritage Foundation, such as Hulsman himself. And whatever the seeming unity in the Bush administration is now, the president could change his mind again as world events change.

Which is just what Hulsman and other "outs" are waiting for.

"If Iraq goes badly, then I think the realists are ready to take control," he predicts.

Excellent, Nimh. Thanks.

I'm sure Walter won't be bothered too much by your (or anyone's) criticism of Schroeder ;-)

We tend not to really personally identfy with "our" PM, chancellor or the like around here ... as in: you dont like my PM? <shrugs> Thats fine ... I don't always, either ...

I was still busy writing the rest of my responses when you posted this. This is all true, of course. Just because the Americans, French and Russians had their hand in creating the current mess in the Middle East, it doesnt mean it's any less up to the Arabs themselves to get themselves out of it. But it might mean that we should respect their decision if they don't want us around this time.



The "no one has oppressed and killed more ..." line would work for most every nation or (as in this case) group of nations in the world. No one has oppressed and killed more Slavs than have The Slavs themselves. No one has oppressed and killed more Americans than have The Americans themselves. Doesnt say much about some kind of presumed level of civilisation of one culture or another, at all.

I remembered something perception told me about here - about the suicide bomber a while ago, he had some background info I didnt know. It made me think of something. He wrote:



Now just today again I read another story confirming that this is indeed how the Iraqi army (etc) operates. The story suggested that a "death squadron" had been added to every army division - to shoot any soldier that would decide not to fight.

Just imagine this: you're an ordinary footsoldier, you know you dont stand a chance against the Americans appearing in front of you, but you have to attack them, or you'll be shot immediately.

To what extent are these soldiers perpetrators, to what extent victims of this war? Remember, American soldiers may all be voluntary recruits, the Iraqi ones certainly arent. They've been forced into the army. And now blackmail has them serving as cannonfodder. To what extent can their deaths be brushed aside as that of so many more combatants? An American soldier has consciously chosen a job in which he might get killed. These Iraqi guys - the regular army footsoldier guys - have been shoved into it considerably more haplessly.

It was thinking about this that I got to feel really uneasy about the lack of body counts. There is a body count, on civilians - it's at 900-1000, now. Reason enough for some here to crow about how few victims this war has taken. But since when do we only count civilians? Nobody is counting the number of Iraqis who died on the battlefield. BBC was reporting on today's advance on Basra alone as having taken "hundreds" of casulaties - thats just Basra, today.

NOTE: I'm not here putting the blame for their deaths on US/British side, at least not solely - it was Saddam who forced them to go to their death, after all, even if it was in a war that the Americans and Brits chose to start. But somebody should have kept track, at the least to prevent or counter the repeat of the whole "clean war" myth, thats now again being presented by the 'smart bombs team'. It might still turn out there have been relatively less deaths now than in the old days - but now we might just never know.

Geligesti

Nice piece, thanks very much.

nimh

You are providing us here with consistently thoughtful and thorough analyses of the issues you address. I thanked you privately, but thought I ought to tip my hat in full public view.

Nimh -- Somewhere today I heard a much higher body count for civilian -- well more than double your figure, and not counting estimates of casualties in the invasion of Baghdad.